Verdun 2

The ‘epargnes’, where the caps of the hills were blown off, turned inside out from peak to trough buy the diligence of miners and mines placed under enemy dug-outs.

France was invaded, the French Coq de Combat is outraged atop his monument. France lost 1, 357, 800 men, and when you include all casualities in addition to those killed in action, this represents 76.3 percent of troops mobilised, as compared to 908,371 British deaths, 35.8 percent of troops mobilised.

In the more « civilised » beginnings of the war, the ‘Kroneprinz’ (Crown Prince Wilhelm) had this shelter built, with nicely detailed window frames.

This is an extraordinary place, the Douaumont Ossuary, where tombs are laid out in long lines, each containing 14 cubic metres of mixed human bones. The building looks out onto the far plains, the forest, and the forest of crosses upon crosses, each one a loved one, nothing to salvage but the name and the honouring. A place to cry.

How could such a thing ever be cleared up ? In the chapel of the Ossuary the French artist Georges Desvallières designed these stained glass windows. He lost two sons in the 1914 - 18 war, fought in it himself, and became interested in developing religious art following the war.  In one picutre he envisages two ruddy faced angels lifting up a soldier grey faced in death. In another, Christ takes up a dead soldier, boots and all, and presses the soldier’s face to his in a gesture so pure, it gives me hope for a love revival.

What would the dead from this time and this place say to us?  I don’t seem to hear them say ‘remember’, I hear rather : save yourselves.

Verdun, rebuilt, is now a world centre for peace.

How can we understand more about violence, recognise it and transform it before it grows great enough for a great war ?

"Formally I have condemned violence, I have escaped from violence, I have justified it, I have said it is natural.  All these things are inattention.  But when I give attention to what I have called violence and in that attention there is care, affection, love, where is there space for violence?"  says Jiddu Krishnamurti.

“The fact is that we are violent, and to ask "How am I not to be violent?" merely creates the ideal, which seems to me to be utterly futile. But if one is capable of looking at violence and understanding it, then perhaps there is a possibility of resolving it totally”.

Verdun

Verdun
In 1914 the lights went out and Europe played murder in the dark. 10 million suffered and died, without counting the countless unspeakable injuries to body and soul.

We made a time to reflect on Europe’s own recent and terrible history, our story, the one which began with the First World War.

The earth is slower than us, she bears the irreparable shape of war. The grass, grown and mown, softens the contours and keeps them in sight. The bodies and bones of hundreds of thousands of beloved sons are gone, broken up and buried, but the ground remembers.

When the war was over, the life and landscape was completely overturned, a massive landfill of metal, corpses and explosives, too dire and dangerous to build on. So they decided to let forest cover it and grow from it. The dismembered stumps of villages, the cacophony of battle, the hundreds of thousands of pits and falls where men died were lost in the woods. The trees are tall now, the peace intense, and very much alive.

The fine straight stone forts seem to have suffered the erosion of a thousand years compacted into a few months. The inside of the forts held and today have been taken by tourists. Their dark secrets must be seen to be believed.

R&B run on the grassy top of the fort, feeling what it was like to throw themselves down in the pits and scramble up their walls : happiness here, another generation’s vigour, another mother’s love.

Pleasure Overload

If I eat my fig jam whilst listening to Amy Winehouse singing Moody's In the Mood for Love, I am at risk of spontaneously combusting with ecstacy,  care needed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f39T_zOT9hI

Fennel

I've been nibbling the leaves in salads, soups and fish dishes, and here the Fennel is in flower, great gawky dancers with flower hands, as tall as I am.  They seem to grow wonderfully just about anywhere.  I'm gloating as the seeds are now ripening,  I am collecting and drying them, to use in the following recipe which I adapted from a recipe for Pyreneean Aniseed Breads, a bit of macaroon texture, no fat! 

Fennel Seed Biscuits

Ingredients

150 g of icing sugar (or grind favourite organic sugar in an electric coffee grinder, works with demerera)

2 eggs

200 g of flour

2 dessert spoons of fennel seeds or aniseed seeds, slightly ground in coffee grinder or pestle and mortar to release and distribute the scent and taste, mmmm

Method

Whisk the sugar and eggs together until a bit frothy, and when you lift up the whisk the batter hangs in 'ribbons'.

Stir in flour and fennel seeds

Spoon into mini fairy cake tin, I use a silicone one, or sort of blob onto greaseproof paper if you don't have the tin.

Cook in oven at 150 centigrade for 15 minutes until slightly golden and firm.

Cevennes Way of Life

I have to mention the wild flowers who lived alongside us.  The unprecedented rain brought forth some Spring flowers, much to my delight, but apprently it is usally jolly hot and the grasslands turn brown and barren.

Long ago the people of Cevennes lived by the sweet chestnut, they gathered them and heated them and trampled them with metal spiked shoes to separate them from their husks.  They made jams and soups and flour from them.   Animals rooted at the feet of the chestnut trees its leaves served as straw, its sticks for fire, its wood for their houses.    Then industrialisation came, the mines were built and people moved away, and the chestnut trees became sad and sick and a way of life died.  However, now people are returning to revive the traditions, chestnut flour is on the market, excellent in pancakes and pastry.  We are eating 'crême de marron' on our toast for breakfast.

In which R discovers he has Hugenot sympathies
We decided to take R&B to a museum to learn about the fate of the Hugonots (Huguenots).    We heard that many of the local houses had Hugenot graves in their gardens, often marked by Cypress trees, as they were forbidden from burying their dead in a churchyard.   R's usual reaction to the word 'museum' is to wilt until his forehead cracks on the ground, and he has many times installed himself at the foot of the pillared entrances of such establishments refusing categorically to go a step further.  However, something about this proposition made him weaken and he announced that he was not a Catholic, he has a Hugenot. 

We learned that the Hugenots were driven from their wealthy smallholdings into the 'desert' of the Cevennes by the wickedly intolerant Louis XIV where they were further persecuted.  Protestants suffered much the same thing as the Catholics in England under Henry VIII,  and came up with similar ways of continuing their religious practice:  pulpits hidden in barrels, priestholes, hidden Bibles and protestant services in the mountain caves by moonlight.  Their watchword was RESISTANCE, which is R's middle name, his first name is shared by the great leader of the Camisards and R was entranced throughout the guided tour by period characters in low budget costume. 

Many Hugenot descendents were in the crowd, the same faces as in the paintings, and any one of the small faced, small featured children with corn coloured hair could have been R's brother or sister.  We treated him to a Hugenot Cross which he wears with pride.  I chatted with one of the staff afterwards and he told me that the percentage of protestants in France is about 4, whereas in the Cevennes it is over 50 percent, and religious fervour is still in evidence, even the 7th Day Adventists have an outpost in Anduze.  So, three centuries later, after seemingly hopeless persecution and anahilation,  the protestants won.  That's resistance.

We volunteered to work an hour a day on the farm, as they are sometimes short handed.  We hoed, one hoe serves for two waterings.  They have to water every day from an underground spring, using an automatic watering system of surface pipes.

How to Go South in Summer

They say in France that people are either Southern or Northern, and I'm firmly in the northern camp.   I have until now refused to go south in the summer, for the following reasons:

• Too hot
• Too bright
• Light too unforgiving
• Traffic jams
• Crowds
• Holiday rental property prices ridiculously inflated
• Riff raff

In the summer every peeping tom, pick-pocket and pimp heads south, as do all those intent on becoming disagreeably drunk and drugged up in large crowds.  We've seen it on the crime programmes.  Dreadful.

However, the three skinnies fancied the idea of a bit of hot sun, and reminded me that I was the only one to enjoy the torrential rain and plummeting temperatures of the Finistere coast.  So I relented.  We consulted the Bison Futé which predicts the state of the roads:  Green Day is good, Orange OK, Red Day means that you can be assured of a good jam on all roads to and from the South,  and a Black Day means that if you look out of your window you will find the traffic jam commences at your own front door so don't even think about it.  Also your mother in law phones you in a state of gleeful doom saying 'tis a Black Day' and chills your very marrow.

The French must like traffic jams because all their rented holiday accommodation goes from Saturday to Saturday, and so all French people who do not have family homes by the sea travel in a long slow moving queue on Saturday.   Not only that, no French business dares to close when there is custom about, only daring to close in the 1st two weeks of August when everyone is on holiday - Black Days assured.   BUT, joy of joy, heh heh heh, I found the ONLY gite in France which starts on a Sunday.  We decided to leave at 4pm on the Red Saturday to avoid the traffic and finish the journey on Green Sunday.  Consequently we left at 9pm, after an ugly incident where we had to turn back from Versailles for my reading glasses, a record breaking 5 hours late.    We reached Beaune without a single jam.  The next day, predictably, no French people were on the road except for the odd lone male, cigarette dangling, who had been sent out to the DIY shop.  We had fun shouting out the other nationalies:  GB, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and mostly Netherlands NL, true to stereotype, hurtling south with their caravans. 

When we stopped at the first 'relais' after Lyon, I started to feel uneasy.  The light was horribly overhead, rendering my paleness uninteresting, my pinkness purple and my multicoloured ensmble ridiculous.  I gained several kilos.  Everyone was wearing khaki, buttermilk and copper tans.    I became convinced I was in hostile territory.  The air had a menacing hot feel which made me finger my throat.  This even though the temperature had plummeted to a seasonally unprecedented 16 degrees with torrential rain forecast.  I developed prickly heat and had to be calmed and coaxed into the continuing the journey.  However, we encountered not a single traffic jam and the first hurdle of holidaying in the south had been successfully overcome.

The second trick was to avoid the coast, and stop at the edge of the Cevennes mountains on an organic farm with a pool.    This was the fourth time I had visited the South, the other three times we were met with seasonally unprecedented plummeting termperatures and unremitting torrential rain and this was no exception.  I was politely requested not to come to the South in the summer again.  JC had left in the car to go on a Medicinal Plants course in the Pyrenees.  We did not know it because his phone was out of action, but he was experiencing a 10 degrees centigrade coldwave, wind, rain and log fires. BUT LUCKILY I had invested in a portable DVD player and had bought 4 Dads Army DVDs in the Charity Shop in England, so we were saved from desperation.  It must be a sign of age that I find Captain Mainwaring appealing and his behaviour admirable.

We still went swimming in the cloud breaks, enjoying one another's screams of pain as the Southerners do not heat their pools (?).

Cevennes Sport and Leisure

R succeeds in his mission to make Papa look silly.

R loves this one of Papa looking wild, a spitting lion fountain...

Some people dive in, some people do it inch by painful inch...

I specified that only pictures of me looking lean tanned and athletic were to be taken.  R enjoyed taking some of the worst pictures ever of a butterball who he claims is me, and spent many happy hours gloating over them and snickering.  I did some pretty heavy censoring and have published the bearable ones where most of me is hidden under water.

R pretends to crack an egg on my head much to B's delight.

B's delight, close-up.

A primate in the trees.

The skinnies dipping.

We went to Forest Parc - a place where wild climbing adventures are organised in trees.  R&B were remarkably agile, for JC it was more of a challenge.  The place was full of Dutch people, some of whom we felt were culturally ill-attuned in the rudeness department.

I flee R's attempt to make me believe there is a spider crawling on my head.

R carries on, JC displays admirable love and patience...

JC takes the management challenge in the over 12s section,  inspired, encouraged and patiently directed by B.

Cevennes Food

Here is the terrace where organic farmhouse vegetarian meals are taken in clement weather, with potted lemon and lime trees and a glimpse of the surrounding mountain forests of the white oak which is evergreen.

Upon fields and orchards

Growing towards harvest

There look with blessing

The spirits of heaven;

And their gaze searches

Our hearts for ripening' 
From 'August' by Adam Bittleston

Smiling tomatoes, fluffy little peaches, crowned pomegranates, and developing figs and olives...

...prepared in our own miniscule kitchen, local sausages fried with rosemary, pasta salad sprinkled with wild flowers, cucumber salad with sheeps milk yoghurt and wild mint dressing.

We also ate pourpier sauvage (purslane) as a green salad and grilling herb.  It's a wild plant which grows in between the rows, much hated as a 'pervasive weed' by the FDA and horribly killed, but in fact delicious, medicinal, and rich in vitamins and Omega 3.  On the farm they feed it to the hens to make their eggs rich in omega 3. 

In the shop selling local produce, we found 'brebis' (sheeps milk cheese), excellent sausages from pigs which trot between the chestnut trees, and everything you can think of to make from chestnuts with their sweet fruit and bitter flower.  We particularly enjoyed herb and flower 'syrops':  thyme, rose and lavender.  All you have to do is make a strong herbal tea with a good lot of flowers/herbs and 500 mls water, then add 500 mls of 'sucre complet' (whole sugar) and boil up into a syrop.  Can be used  to make drinks diluted with iced water, or to flavour yoghurts.   We invented 'honey rose' sheeps milk yoghurt, with mountain honey and syrop de rose food for the Gods.

A hot smoking southern rosemary...

A pumpkin turning golden, ready for harvest when the umbilical stalk is dry and no longer feeding, kept for winter soup, or if particularly big and beautiful, kept as decoration and doorstop to remind us of Jupiter's largesse.

www.lemasperdu.comgite ferme biologique